“The reliable Gospel eye witness accounts aren’t the only ancient description of Jesus. There also non-Christian descriptions of Jesus from the late 1st to 5th Century.” Read on the non-Christian accounts by J. Wallace Arnold here:

3 Responses to Is There Evidence For Jesus Outside The Bible?

Though the record begins with a small family from one of the tribes of Israel, leaving Jerusalem before its destruction; the record contains an account of Christ appearing to approximately 2,500 souls, AFTER His resurrection.

Mary, the claims made by Joseph Smith and Mormons in general are not backed up historical record. It is commonly understood that the Jews were meticulous record keepers of their genealogies. There are no records of any Nephites or Lamanites that left Israel or even existed in the first place.

The claim that the Native Americans were descendants of the Lamanites has never been proven as well. DNA proves that the Native Americans do not have any Jewish DNA in their sequences.

In excess of a hundred and fifty tribes have been tested now, these are scattered all over north and central and South America, even to Greenland. And from that survey, in excess of five and a half thousand individuals have been involved and have been tested, from those five and a half thousand, 99.4% of Native Americans have a mitochondrial DNA lineage that originated in Asia. There can be no question: 99.4%. The other 0.6% have either a European or an African mitochondrial lineage. The very tiny minority of European and African lineages that they do find came after Columbus. Currently on the available evidence there’s nothing to suggest a [Native American Indian] relationship whatsoever with Israelites.
(Dr. Simon Southerton, Molecular Biologist) (ex-Mormon)http://www.csiro.au/people/Simon.Southerton.html

There is no compelling evidence for a connection between Jewish populations and Native American populations based on genetics. Probably the most fundamental and the most definitive evidence for that has been based on mitochondrial and Y-chromosome data. If you look at genes in Native Americans, they came from their ancestors. They had to come from their ancestral populations, and those ancestors lived somewhere. You can look for those genes in Jewish populations, but you don’t find them. If you look at genes that are most commonly found in Native American populations and those that are most commonly found in Jewish populations, they don’t coincide at all.
(Dr. David Glenn Smith, Molecular Anthropologist, University of California-Davis)
Curriculum Vitae: http://www.anthro.ucdavis.edu/~dgsmith/dgs.html

Has anyone actually seen the supposed plates? Where are they and have they been examined by outside sources to prove their validity? Clearly, the answer is no.

Mary, I don’t know if you looked at the sources in the link, but they were pagan sources, Non-Christian sources. The biases that the authors had were against the Christians and hence they can be classed as independent. The authenticity of those sources is accepted by most (if not all) non-Christian scholars. That was the reason that the blog writer gave them.

The document that you refer to is not independent in the sense that the sources mentioned above are and is not dated earlier than the late 1820s by anyone other than those connected with the Church of the LDS normally referred to as Mormons.